Sister languageIn historical linguistics, sister languages are cognate languages; that is, languages that descend from a common ancestral language, their so-called proto-language. Every language in a language family that descends from the same language as the others is a sister to them. A commonly given example is the Romance languages, each of which is a continuation of Vulgar Latin. Italian and French (both Romance languages) have about 89% lexical overlap, meaning 89 percent of words share the same characteristics and root origins.
English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family. It originated in early medieval England and, today, is the most spoken language in the world and the third most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states. There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.
Mutual intelligibilityIn linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. Intelligibility between languages can be asymmetric, with speakers of one understanding more of the other than speakers of the other understanding the first.
Language familyA language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.
Catalan languageCatalan (ˈkætələn,_-æn,_ˌkætəˈlæn; autonym: català, kətəˈla), known in the Valencian Community and Carche as Valencian (autonym: valencià), is a Western Romance language. It is the official language of Andorra, and an official language of two autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. It is also an official language in Valencia, where it is called Valencian.
Romance languagesThe Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are numerous modern languages that evolved from Late Latin and its spoken form, often called Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages branch of the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (489 million), Portuguese (283 million), French (80 million), Italian (67 million) and Romanian (24 million), which are all national languages of their respective countries of origin.
Romanian languageRomanian (obsolete spellings: Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: limba română ˈlimba roˈmɨnə, or românește, in Romanian) is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. As a minority language it is spoken by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania (Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia and Ukraine), and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 28–29 million people as an L1+L2 language, of whom 24 million are native speakers. In Europe, Romanian occupies the 10th position among 37 official languages.
Italian languageItalian (italiano itaˈljaːno or lingua italiana ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), and is the primary language of Vatican City. It has official minority status in Croatia and in some areas of Slovenian Istria.
